Tag: controls

Where accountancy will go

Considering the progress made in the accountancy sector with ‘continuous’ assurance, it struck me that until now, process (read: mere procedures) was driven by technology, at least up till now. Because the idea of ‘transactions’ in that, now quickly antiquating, ERP system we all know, was based like it was and is in all the other comparable systems or less, on the ideas before that. And procedures just had to adapt to the software. No, not the other way around; that’s pure marketing babble!
So, now we (hopefully soon) have XML and XBRL to take some work off our hands (?). But also … qua big d analysis (tired of writing / pronouncing that at full length..!) we’re moving ahead. To be able, would be able, to just dump all ‘transactions’ or primitives into a big db and then run ad hoc queries on them, possibly with some AI in the mix. Who needs separate bookkeepers’ accounts when all source data is available in blobs or whatever ..?

Which may require a leapfrog of assurance. But hey, the world wasn’t invented to service that, but the other way around.
Any thoughts ..?

Thought so. hence:
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[Oh, the Great Outdoors! … Central Park, NY, NY]

Fun / stagnation

About the difference between boring and Inspirational! in business.

Old New
Process, procedures, work steps Request for direction
Compliance Demonstrating failure; to learn
Punishment for (anyone’s! esp. higher-ups’) failures Coaching towards more errors
Stepping out of line (even by casual remarks hinting at less than 100% drone motivation) is failure Pivoting (even for your contribution) is near-mandatory
Succes is obedience to the gallows Success is coming up with / doing the hitherto infeasible, unthinkable
The ones exploiting drones (licking up / kicking down) and (only) best versed at sticking to their chair, are promoted Promotion? We don’t do rank and file here; we like your creative more or less
You’re fired – just because you’re a number that turned up in the lottery – that’s held every couple of months because bosses are bored and utterly incapable of coming up with anything revenue-increasing i.s.o. cutting costs and shrinking is growing, right? Even when the shrinking cuts out exactly the very growth-enhancing competences you need ever more desparate. You’re allowed to pursue a career elsewhere, too but we don’t want to lose you. What can we do to make you like it even more here?
“(The ‘innovator’s dilemma’ is that ‘doing the right thing is the wrong thing.’) As Christensen saw it, the problem was the velocity of history, and it wasn’t so much a problem as a missed opportunity, like a plane that takes off without you, except that you didn’t even know there was a plane, and had wandered onto the airfield, which you thought was a meadow, and the plane ran you over during takeoff.” (as here; very instructive) The same.
Fade to grey “I’m Cool”

3+ bodies found in business

… just about everywhere. Of course I refer to the n-body problem set with n > 3 as here.
Because it is so dismally known, and applied. Most starkly (#loveofwords) in ‘business’ ‘strategy’, where the lack of wisdom is clearly demonstrated in the lack of inclusion of all (sic) potential (sic; including chance function estimations) competitors’ moves. Name any market where the latter s doesn’t apply, and report it to (anti-?)cartel authorities.

I.e., the Problem applied to strategy means: Strategising is futile, all your course belong to us. On a side note:
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[Alignment; Vienna]

Not even bread

Juvenalis was correct. But isn’t anymore.

People do still care for bread, and circuses, but the latter-day economy slowly degrades to only provide the latter. As in: The 0,1% (yes indeed, the next-0,9% is under threat as well) that consists of a handful of behind-the-scene creeps (as defined by Jaron Lanier) and a less than handful of Universe-scale lucky start-ups, run the economy, ‘jobs’, of the 5% petty work-slaves that are the ‘new’ generations of app developers and ‘disruptors’ (quod non) – let to play and claim some fame, until play time (circus) is over and the 0,1% reels in the money buckets. Never mind that income of the petty, was dismally low (“you shouldn’t want to earn, but grow..!”, right?). Never mind that this structure leads to no money buckets remaining anymore in the end. Never mind that the circuses lead to just about everyone believing they have a shot at fame – with enough ackonwledgement of history and historical facts, they would see that a. chances are so slim to none, very, very close to none; b. levelling would benefit hugely many more, and quicker, and would make all things more robust leaving time for actually gratifying societal actions.

As there’s a huge middle class of just-slightly-less-überhip to not-hip-at-all people that would want to work for bread – but either can’t find anything other than stale ever simpler jobs in stale ever more brittle companies (no circus shows at all) as long as the latter last (ever shorter) for ever less bread, or are pushed into Etsy Arcadia where barter and trade will not suffice to pay your mortgage for a long time if ever. Yes the latter is more fulfilling than comfortable (?? not.) numbness, but when (not if) leading to starvation of lower Maslow levels, will achieve much less accomplishment of higher M levels by default. And that’s still how we all roll… [In the Western world]

So… is there a middle ground, for the 94,9% in the middle when the middle ground they held, vanished and not much appeared yet ..? The ‘hope’is of course that the 0,1% will either tumble long before the Singularity, or the Singularity will overtake them…

OK, will lighten up…:
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[Ávila, to keep the hordes out of the lush gardens ..?]

Too Big (to … whatever)

As predicted, ERP has dropped from view in the world of business and/or tech.
Because reasons. Many of which have to do with the bigness of it all; one would really need to have a business so big to be able to capture all advantages of ‘seamless’ integration of systems into one, and not or, have to transform it so completely as to better have built the new one all from scratch (or schlepping in all the parts of the old, into the new mold). Which sort-of defeats the purpose. Completely.

Hence, the demise of ERP (as predicted here) has taken its final form. For now; we expect shrinkage of attention and market share to continue.

This, triggered by yet another laggard attempt i.e., by some government, to implement SAP througout at some Department but failed. Typical cost (overrun): €196M zooming out to €900M which only suffices to salvage some parts that work. Typically, because Reality didn’t seem to want to fit into the ideal mold set out but just went its own way, the way which it was on from before the start. Not even wrecking the project on purpose, just going along and not even noticing the project’s required changes as daily business had better things to do. As it was called: Where (the failure of) makeability [translations manufacturability and engineerability have also been seen in the wild] met reality.

So, no need to resort to Project Governance mumbo-jumbo. Just too big is reality, and:
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[Huh? Well, it’s Cyprus Meridien but why ..?]

‘sup, competitor ..?

Oh yes, of course. One couldn’t leave Docker to capture all the market as one understands the power of (being a) monopoly, right ..?
Was the first that crossed my mind when reading this here piece on D’s competitor Rocket. Still backing D, the Big G will now play them against each other ..?

Anyway:
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[Wouldn’t life without competition be like this, always ..? Resson, FR]

Dump’let

Just a little dump’let of Inspirational tweets:

That’ll be all… Pics will return tomorrow.

P( Danger(You) > 0.5 ) ⇒ Shutdown( You )

For the Fellow Travelers among you, that still believe that AI (AGI or ASI) will bring us joy and an arcadic peaceful creative work-free life forever after, please do consider this here piece. And see that we’re only at the beginning.
[Oh for AGI/ASI reference, see here.]

Luckily, hopefully, the tide will turn. But there simply is no guarantee it will.

And on this most pleasant note, I’ll leave you with:
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[Málaga – but when the struggle is forbidden and ‘ratio’ quod non might seem to prevail, the Dark may roar and explode out of its confines in utterly destructive ways. As in this previous post…]

Digital Native Schative

A couple of weeks ago, there was this little row (that you may easily have missed) about some recruiter requiring digital nativity (yes.) of candidates (and whether that would be discriminatory since it would exclude ‘old’ folks). As in this here discussion.
Where the point was largely missed that one would indeed not want to hire anyone who would consider themselves qualified on this point…

As

  • Considering yourself such a native, or ‘born digital’ or whatever ridiculous phrase one could use, disqualifies you as you have no clue:
  • Those born in a time when there was already something digital (e.g., like stand-alone PCs), will still have grown up in environments with hardly if any of those devices. Either due to region (PCs were around in the US in the 80s, not so much elsewhere) or class (as if less moneyed classes had PCs in the US, before the 00s). Same / similar for all (sic) other ‘devices’, ‘systems’, and developments, that one could consider to fall under the ‘digital’ class if there were such a thing. If ‘born digital’ is about ‘computers’ having been around: that started in the 60s ..! If it is about pervasive ‘digital’ stuff being around: Those kids are still infants (mentally!), 0-20yrs of age; only some escape this nubness and indeed do understand technology.
  • So, there’s hardly anyone who could actually claim to be born and raised (sic) digitally. Maybe a handful, possibly placed outside their bio family by authorities as the digital overload would count as child molestation (compared to their peers, playing outside).
  • And, all the other kids may have actually learned something of the outside world in which one has to live (or be kept (sic) in a basement all their life…). May; apart from those that didn’t properly learn to ride a bike since they were driven around by tiger moms. Still, the ‘born and raised’ digital, would be of no use in the real world due to knowing nothing of it.
  • The ‘digital’ has in the mean time exploded. Is it about mobile, about social, about devices, about apps, actual applications, programming, security, business deployment, assembler, design (of ‘web’ sites (huh whaddoyoumean ..!?), apps, devices, brands, or ..?), privacy, economics, …, …? No-one can cover them all; some may cover a few but certainly not more. So anyone claiming to master the world because they were ‘born digital’, I show you the Fool. Ecco homo.
  • So you’d better not hire such worldview-morons.

But then, you could hire me. I was trained to work on mainframes (operations) and early PCs (use, programming down to C and assembler), have learned hardcore HTML (3, 4) back in the day and moved to ‘modern’ applications, and understand the Real World through education and experience (also in the business world), etc.etc.
Your call.

For reference:
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[‘Native’ …? Córdoba]

Signalling healthy process

Yet some more cross-over ideas from the IoT world into the administrative bureaucratic office world: Streams of transactions as signals.
Of the health of the process, of course. To be defined, obviously, as the fit to the surroundings. The fit may be off, either intentionally (wanting to let the world adapt to the process, enforcing (?) change) or unintentionally left blank                i.e., having to cope with exceptions to what was envisaged as transactions’ content or form.

Now apply yesterday’s first picture of process control.
Now, too, consider what one could do with sampling theory (as a subset of ‘Shannon’, if properly elaborated, possibly skirting with ‘classical’ statistics ..?). Taking 2log(n) samples (where n is the number of transactions ..?? Just a wild guess) and being able to reconstruct the ‘signal’ then taking its integral (discrete transactions … just summing it up ..?) for the total. Or Fourier-transforming it all and … get your basic theory straight before dreaming of moving on so don’t start at the other end as ‘accountant’…! And/or treating exceptions (as e.g., found by the sort of analysis that these girls/guys are so good at; that not even being meant as a cynical qualifier) as noise to the signal. Never fully suppressable, but useful to pick up secondary signals, stacked in their variation of frequencies, amplitudes an wavelet transformations. That all tell you something, if you listen. Whether you want perfect, over-HiFi replay [intermission: Ugh I’m getting old, even knowing that HiFi was a thing…], or lively veracity, actual fullness of music. And take in again the ole’ industrial process control with its recipe / derivative function(s), et al., and be able to better control it all from the ‘dashboard’ in the control room. When all of the routine stuff, the routine 80%, of business is done by … ‘robots’. Humanoid or digital-machines, IDC.

And hey, while we’re at it, why not throw in attempts to include in bookkeeping not only discrete numbers (arbitrarily rounded to hunderds, of random currencies) but Real numbers or even Complex numbers as well ..? The latter, e.g., to indicate VAT surcharges, etc.; leading to tuples-as-single-‘numbers’ in bookkeeping. Maybe somewhat harder to track that all is booked correctly, but also maybe powerful in capturing singular transactions and some processing rules/logic, and controls, in one tuple (‘record’).

Where AI may then be applied to do sanity checks. Not on this author; no AGI or ASI would suffice…

OK, for now:
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[“What a shoe box” but yes that *is* the Bata shoe museum, Toronto]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord